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I am pretty new to tau and have only played a few games but in those games marker-lights have been extremely inconstant for me.

I run 8 pathfinders so I have on average 4 marker light hits a turn.

Against non-marines the marker lights are really good. 4 hits means I can reduce/remove cover, increase some bs and if I have left over lower LD so they are more likely to fall back. Before taking marker lights a eldar pathfinder group would really put the hurt on me by sniping out my characters while staying safe with the 2+ cover save. Marker lights allow me to remove that cover save and crush them. As a whole non-marines have less armor so they have to stick to the ruins, and my marker lights can expose them. They also have less LD so removing a point or two makes it easy for them to fail their moral test.

Against marines marker lights are just lack luster. If 4 markerlights hit I struggle to find uses for them. 3+ armor means that they don't need to hide in the ruins and even if they did their armor save is better than the cover and we lack AP3 weapons. And they shall know no fear means that removing LD from them seems pointless. All the markerlights do is raise my BS, which is nice but you can only do that so much. So against marines markerlights seem like a waste of points.

So because of the inconsistency of markerlights are they worth taking in an all comers army list? When they are good they are great and when they are bad they are bad.

If you read the rules for marker lights, you call what you are going to use the makerlight hits for before you roll the dice

 UltramarineRV wrote:
If you read the rules for marker lights, you call what you are going to use the makerlight hits for before you roll the dice

I am not sure what you are getting at. You fire the lights and the unit gets a counter for every hit. Then you can remove the counter to boost another unites shooting. So if 4 hit you might increase bs with 1 counter and remove 3 cover with the rest. And yes, all these decisions happen before the unit shoots. I am not sure where you are getting the idea I am using the lights afterwards.

Marker lights are great but the pathfinders with there BS 3 and only carapace amour will generally die pretty quickly.

Any negative LD modifiers tend to be useless for almost every Marine army, so try to focus your tactics on the other 4 benefits (+BS,-cover, ignore night fight, missile)

But if you’re having trouble with MEQ try the Helios pattern crisis suit and deep strike them close for a desiccative strike at the right moment or use the highly underrated ion canon and laugh at MEQ 3 at a time at a distance.

pathfinders are better suited as a bait unit that if survived till turn 2+ can sit there and help pick out important targets when it counts. (the more they shoot at them, the more time you get to shoot your broadsides)

Try out the tetras. Fast, cheap, and durable with a 3+ cover save. They draw a lot of fire that they just shrug off and can do some nice damage with 4 BS4 marker lights per tetra. Try turboboosting a few piranha behind enemy tanks with seeker missiles and then use the tetras to fire the missiles in tank's rear armor.

 Desubot wrote:
Marker lights are great but the pathfinders with there BS 3 and only carapace amour will generally die pretty quickly.

Any negative LD modifiers tend to be useless for almost every Marine army, so try to focus your tactics on the other 4 benefits (+BS,-cover, ignore night fight, missile)

But if you’re having trouble with MEQ try the Helios pattern crisis suit and deep strike them close for a desiccative strike at the right moment or use the highly underrated ion canon and laugh at MEQ 3 at a time at a distance.

pathfinders are better suited as a bait unit that if survived till turn 2+ can sit there and help pick out important targets when it counts. (the more they shoot at them, the more time you get to shoot your broadsides)

Negative LD modifiers are useless. Ignoring nightfire is useless as I have BSF on all my long range stuff, -cover is useless because they have 3+ armor save and missile is useless as I don't want to spend 10 points on 1 s8 shot. So against marines the only useful thing to do with markerlights is increase BS. And that is the point of the thread. Against non-marines markerlights are amazing but against marines they suck.

If you think denying cover is useless against marines then you obviously aren't using enough plasma. 10 marines in cover in assault range of your pathfinders is pretty scary, until you kill half of them with plasma guns and the rest with volumes of S5.

Also I notice that Marine players have a lot of fun popping smoke on all of those tanks in the open. It really stinks when you get a railgun through a land raider only to have your opponent stop it on a 5+

One other fun tactic is when your opponent has something in the open that really needs to die, and you give it a -1 cover save so that even if they went to ground they would still eat that railgun.

In response to your question, I think markerlights are a great thing to have at all times, against all opponents. If you feel they aren't helping you, then take less of them. Keep on trying, and good luck.

A wise and experienced player once gave me some advice which has made an extraordinary difference in my games.
He said that when it comes to armies with high armor, namely SMs, what you want to do is make him roll as many armor saves as possible. That is one thing SM players HATE having to do, because every roll is a risk of losing expensive infantry.

My point? Raising your BS is no small thing when your guns are S5. Jack your BS up to 5. More hits means more wounds, more wounds means he has to roll more armor saves. Rolling more armor saves means failing more armor saves. Quantity of small arms fire will whittle down even terminators. The one and only downside to pulse rifles is the low BS of the units that carry them... But your markerlights easily eliminate that!
So look at it this way: Now you don't have to fuss with wasting markerlight tokens on his cover or Ld. (Unless those markerlights are eliminating cover for high BS Crisis suits which ignore his armor)

Thanks for this! I'm playing my first game as Tau on Thursday, well Tau with Blood Angel allies

BS boosts against 4+ or better armour or an kind of invulnerable save is really key. Just some quick math here.

12 Bs 3 Firewarriors shooting marinesat 15 inches: 24 shots, 12 hits, 2.67 dead marines.

If we make them BS 4: 24 shots, 16 hits, 3.55 dead marines.

At BS 5: 24 shots, 20 hits, 4.44 dead marines.

If you have 4 tokens, that means 2 full Firewarrior squads can reduce a full ten marine squad into irrelevance in a single turn.

I have used similar saturation fire to wipe out terminator squads as well and I am hoping to see it do the same against Wraiths in the near future.

if you want something different, you may try some allies. Like a simple farseer eldar with just 5 guardians or something for sitting on an objective (or the more expensive pathfinders) gives you a free set of "marker lights for bs" in that you can twin link your stuff, and possibly have other uses for self buffs/debuffs on the enemy as well as psychic protection.

SM allies also help with this. Also can join your low leadership units and even if you break, as long as one guy (or IC) has ATSKNF, your fire warriors can get it too. (liby, techmarine, or other IC's of choice can join your units)

SM allies also unlock some storm talon and drop pods which can be pretty useful as Tau is still kind of light on air defense.

You can also use the S6AP3 Marine killing sniper drones, and then pulling away that cover, raising that BS, and even the -LD are INCREDIBLY useful.